A new canon, created by 19 people

In The Sea and the Mirror, W.H. Auden audaciously wrote new poems in the voices of each character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, all set after the action of the play concludes. The result is a work both wonderfully reverent and plainly modern—you might even call it modern in its reverence.

I would have hoped that anyone presuming to put out a book called A New New Testament would borrow Auden’s approach and give us a genuine literary and theological invention. Instead, the new book Hal Taussig has rather grandiosely published under that title is something both less and more audacious: an edition of the canonical New Testament interleaved with ten “new” scriptures and a commentary on the newly proposed canon.

The ten additions have drawn the most comment, and I’m as struck by the exclusion of the genuinely fascinating and informative Didache as I am by the inclusion of the miserably dull Gospel of Truth. But tastes will vary, I suppose, and not all the selections are as poor as that.